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For as much news as China’s smog situation makes, another large problem has lagged in attention—the pollution of 8 million acres of farmland across the country.

The land is far too polluted with heavy metals and chemicals that it can’t be used to grow food, Wang Shiyuan, deputy minister of China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection said Monday.

The Ministry found “moderate to severe pollution” on 3.3 million hectares (8.3 million acres) of land, according to Huffington Post. The country needs at least 120 million hectares of arable land to meet the large population’s needs. The nation began the year with 135 million hectares of arable land, but contamination and efforts to convert farmland to forests, grasslands and wetlands dropped that amount to 120 million hectares, ThinkProgress reported.

“These areas cannot continue farming,” Wang said.

China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection says it will spend billions of yuan to transform its polluted land. Photo credit: Chindia-Alert.org

Wang added that he would spend “tens of billions of yuan” per year to rehabilitate polluted land. Farmers are already prohibited from raising crops for humans in areas deemed too badly polluted, though tainted rice and other crops still wound up in the food supply.

China’s main grain, rice, has been hampered by Cadmium, which is a carcinogenic metal that can cause kidney damage. Chinese authorities began investigating rice mills in May after test results found that nearly half of supplies sold in Guangzhou were contaminated with cadmium.

“Cadmium has a tendency to accumulate in the kidney and liver,” Chen Nengchang, a scholar at the Guangdong Institute of Eco-environment and Soil Sciences, told The New York Times. “When the accumulation reaches a certain point, it will pose a serious health risk for the organs.”

Wang’s press conference comes at the end of a year when the Chinese government received complaints about its refusal to release results of a nationwide soil pollution survey. The Ministry came under fire after declaring the results a “state secret.”

“We think it’s always the right of the public to know how bad the situation is,” said Ma Tianjie, a Greenpeace East Asia researcher. “The Chinese public can accept the fact that our environment is polluted. The important thing is to give them the means to challenge polluters and improve the environment, and not just keep them in the dark.”

Comments

why don’t they plant trees to help with the Co2 problems and then harvest the wood for building materials?

tocamo

trees are not edible, therefore of little importance to them.

Jen in China

Good thought. Buildings in China rarely use wood, most that I have seen are brick, concrete and metal. Even the walls of our apartment.

toddboyle

Umm. If the crops are too contaminated for human consumption, the last thing you want to do is feed them to livestock, in most cases the chemicals bioconcentrate in the animals and that’s even MORE hazardous.

tocamo

the last thing we should be doing is using ANY food products from China..boycott them big time.

JackLinks

Or 12,500 square miles!

Brian Cartwright

Biochar is a very promising technology for remediation of heavy metal pollution, and has many other soil benefits. Research has been widespread for several years; here is an abstract of a project including investigators in China:

When we must wait a long time for the negative consequences of our actions, it seems many of us go and commit the acts that will bring short-term gain and long-term loss. What might stop people from abusing their very own land? Perhaps if people did not feel so desperate for an income but felt materially secure, then they might be able to afford to look over the horizon. Such security could come in the form of an extra income apart from one’s labor. And if the source of that extra income were the value of land, then people would care about the health of land — the healthier the land, the heftier their share of the rental value of the land; now starting at progress.org.

Ridgely Mu’min

When China decided to get into the WTO in 2000 and reduce her farm population by 20 million, she knew she was taking a risk. She must now buy land in other parts of the world which will increase land prices above what local populations can afford, thus spreading her food security problem to others. All of this was predicted by the West in order to make China a villain.